Marketing Growth Hacks

How to Use the Clickx App to Glean Insight Into Your Competitors

Though the information can be invaluable, following your competitors for strategy ideas can take a lot of time. If you’re struggling to dig up anything useful, it may even have you questioning whether it’s worth it in the first place.

Fortunately, you no longer have to manually track your competition. The Clickx App is an inbound marketing tool with an entire section dedicated to monitoring your competitors. Within a few clicks you can glean valuable insights, and use it to improve your own business.

In this post, we’ll discuss the benefits of tracking your competitors, then walk you through how to use the Clickx App to do so—without investing endless hours. Let’s get cracking!

Key Takeaways

You can automate tracking vital pieces of competitor information using the Clickx App, which saves time and resources in the long run.

You can get as creative as you want with the resulting data to upstage your competitors in search results.

The Value of Tracking Your Competitors

Tracking your competitors saves time and research when experimenting to find what works for others. We’ve talked about how to benefit from tracking your competitors’ online strategies before, including:

Discovering their top performing content, including the style, content type, and intended audience.

Giving you a head start on anticipating and answering customer questions.

Now, normally this kind of in-depth research takes a lot of sleuthing because you have to manually hunt down the information. This is where we come in. We designed our Clickx App to make monitoring your competitors’ relevant SEO tricks a lot easier.

In order to complete the steps we’re about to teach you, you’ll need to already be at least a little acquainted with the Clickx App. If you don’t already have an account, you can sign up with a free 14 day trial.

This is where you’ll find the information about your competitors tracked by the Clickx App. It may be blank right now, in which case you can start by adding a few competitor sites you want to follow so the app can begin tracking them.

Assuming you’ve begun to track your competitors, you’ll see a list to choose from. This would be a good time to choose one of your competitors to browse the collected data for throughout this tutorial:

Before we begin, note that the following tips are in no particular order—so feel free to mix and match as you see fit, depending on your needs.

1. Research External Backlinks

Backlinks are essentially the citations of the internet, and are references to your website on others. Google values these highly as an indicator that your business is reputable within the online community. It’s important to remember that when it comes to backlinks, quality and relevancy trump quantity.

On your chosen competitor’s page, you can find external backlinks by clicking View Full List in the box labeled Backlinks. You can download this data in a spreadsheet file or review it at your leisure:

This information will help you discover potential relationships to build on for developing your own strong backlinks. Once you’ve found a few mutually beneficial sites, you can court them by producing solid content (such as how-tos), which they will hopefully be happy to link back to. Simply put, don’t be afraid to reach out and get to know the producers of the website!

2. Track Organic Keywords

Keywords are words or phrases you’d like your website to rank for in search engines, and are a cornerstone of SEO. Targeting one long-tail keyword can actually help you rank for other semantically similar keywords.

To access these in the Clickx App, revisit the Competitor page. Below the Backlinks box, you’ll find a section titled Top Organic Keywords. Here you’ll find a summary with the View Full List option for in-depth details.

On this page, you can figure out how highly your competitor ranks in search results for each keyword, along with how much traffic it generates:

Search queries that get a lot of organic traffic will be crucial to your keyword strategy. Understanding which keywords your competitors have successfully targeted opens up a lot of doors and gives you a head start on ranking better than them. For example, one way is to swoop in and steal the spotlight with your own amazing content targeting the same or similar keywords.

Of course, your mileage may vary depending on the situation—but here you’re only limited by your creativity.

3. Explore Anchor Text

Anchor text refers to the words or characters that link to another document or page on the web. These words are valuable for links both on your own site, and in your backlinks from other websites. They are measured in value by link relevancy, meaning that the content of the anchor text is closely related to its associated link. In short, link relevancy can be a powerful search engine ranking metric.

To find this information for your competition, we’ll go back to the Competitor page again. Up near the top-right hand corner, you’ll find a pie graph labeled Anchor Text.

Each slice of the pie represents a unique set of characters that link back to your competitor’s website from elsewhere on the internet. The most frequently used anchor text will have the largest slice of the pie. If there are many sets, you can use the up and down buttons at the end of the visible list to scroll through the entire data set:

Being able to see what words people use to link back to your competitor will give you additional insight into their keyword strategy. You can tie these back into your own strategy by writing content that would be likely to garner backlinks using similar text. That way, when you build those relationships for backlinks, you can double down on their power with anchor text tying back in with your target keywords.

Conclusion

Following up on your competitor’s strategy may be helpful, but only if it doesn’t hog up all your time and resources. With a tool such as the Clickx App, you can legally track your competitors’ SEO strategies to create a well-researched strategy of your own.

Here are three things the Clickx App can help you gain competitor insight on:

Potential backlinks.

Strong organic keywords.

Valuable anchor text.

Do you have any questions about using the Clickx App to track your competition? Let us know in the comments below!

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Solomon Thimothy is the Co-founder of Clickx. Solomon began his career in marketing over ten years ago with a focus on helping businesses gain better visibility online by focusing on more exposure, more traffic and more leads. Follow him on twitter @sthimothy

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Greg HenryCEO – DecisionPoint Systems, Inc.

We have partnered with Clickx for the last 10 years to not only build and manage our website, but also to support our SEO and inbound marketing initiatives. They do great work in addition to being easy to work with and always bring new ideas to the table. I would recommend them to everyone looking to improve their web presence and demand generation efforts.